From the looks of things, companies in the category — including Agility Robotics and Formlogic — can’t hire quickly enough.

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Once upon a time, educators worried about the dangers of CliffsNotes — study guides that rendered great works of literature as a series of bullet points that many students used as a replacement for actually doing the reading.

Today, that sure seems quaint.

Suddenly, new consumer AI tools have hit the market that can take any piece of text, audio or video and provide that same kind of simplified summary. And those summaries aren’t just a series of quippy text in bullet points. These days students can have tools like Google’s NotebookLM turn their lecture notes into a podcast, where sunny-sounding AI bots banter and riff on key points. Most of the tools are free, and do their work in seconds with the click of a button.

Naturally, all this is causing concern among some educators, who see students off-loading the hard work of synthesizing information to AI at a pace never before possible.

But the overall picture is more complicated, especially as these tools become more mainstream and their use starts to become standard in business and other contexts beyond the classroom.

And the tools serve as a particular lifeline for neurodivergent students, who suddenly have access to services that can help them get organized and support their reading comprehension, teaching experts say.

“There’s no universal answer,” says Alexis Peirce Caudell, a lecturer in informatics at Indiana University at Bloomington who recently did an assignment where many students shared their experience and concerns about AI tools. “Students in biology are going to be using it in one way, chemistry students are going to be using it in another. My students are all using it in different ways.”

It’s not as simple as assuming that students are all cheaters, the instructor stresses.

“Some students were concerned about pressure to engage with tools — if all of their peers were doing it that they should be doing it even if they felt it was getting in the way of their authentically learning,” she says. They are asking themselves questions like, “Is this helping me get through this specific assignment or this specific test because I’m trying to navigate five classes and applications for internships” — but at the cost of learning?

It all adds new challenges to schools and colleges as they attempt to set boundaries and policies for AI use in their classrooms.

Need for ‘Friction’

It seems like just about every week -— or even every day — tech companies announce new features that students are adopting in their studies.

Just last week, for instance, Apple released Apple Intelligence features for iPhones, and one of the features can recraft any piece of text to different tones, such as casual or professional. And last month ChatGPT-maker OpenAI released a feature called Canvas that includes slider bars for users to instantly change the reading level of a text.

Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, says he is worried that students are lured by the time-saving promises of these tools and may not realize that using them can mean skipping the actual work it takes to internalize and remember the material.

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“From a teaching, learning standpoint, that's pretty concerning to me,” he says. “Because we want our students to struggle a little bit, to have a little bit of friction, because that's important for their learning.”

And he says new features are making it harder for teachers to encourage students to use AI in helpful ways — like teaching them how to craft prompts to change the writing level of something: “It removes that last level of desirable difficulty when they can just button mash and get a final draft and get feedback on the final draft, too.”

Even professors and colleges that have adopted AI policies may need to rethink them in light of these new types of capabilities.

As two professors put it in a recent op-ed, “Your AI Policy Is Already Obsolete.”

“A student who reads an article you uploaded, but who cannot remember a key point, uses the AI assistant to summarize or remind them where they read something. Has this person used AI when there was a ban in the class?” ask the authors, Zach Justus, director of faculty development at California State University, Chico, and Nik Janos, a professor of sociology there. They note that popular tools like Adobe Acrobat now have “AI assistant” features that can summarize documents with the push of a button. “Even when we are evaluating our colleagues in tenure and promotion files,” the professors write, “do you need to promise not to hit the button when you are plowing through hundreds of pages of student evaluations of teaching?”

Instead of drafting and redrafting AI policies, the professors argue that educators should work out broad frameworks for what is acceptable help from chatbots.

But Watkins calls on the makers of AI tools to do more to mitigate the misuse of their systems in academic settings, or as he put it when EdSurge talked with him, “to make sure that this tool that is being used so prominently by students [is] actually effective for their learning and not just as a tool to offload it.”

Uneven Accuracy

These new AI tools raise a host of new challenges beyond those at play when printed CliffsNotes were the study tool du jour.

One is that AI summarizing tools don’t always provide accurate information, due to a phenomenon of large language models known as “hallucinations,” when chatbots guess at facts but present them to users as sure things.

When Bonni Stachowiak first tried the podcast feature on Google’s NotebookLM, for instance, she said she was blown away by how lifelike the robot voices sounded and how well they seemed to summarize the documents she fed it. Stachowiak is the host of the long-running podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, and dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University of Southern California, and she regularly experiments with new AI tools in her teaching.

But as she tried the tool more, and put in documents on complex subjects that she knew well, she noticed occasional errors or misunderstandings. “It just flattens it — it misses all of this nuance,” she says. “It sounds so intimate because it’s a voice and audio is such an intimate medium. But as soon as it was something that you knew a lot about it’s going to fall flat.”

Even so, she says she has found the podcasting feature of NotebookLM useful in helping her understand and communicate bureaucratic issues at her university — such as turning part of the faculty handbook into a podcast summary. When she checked it with colleagues who knew the policies well, she says they felt it did a “perfectly good job.” “It is very good at making two-dimensional bureaucracy more approachable,” she says.

Peirce Caudell, of Indiana University, says her students have raised ethical issues with using AI tools as well.

“Some say they’re really concerned about the environmental costs of generative AI and the usage,” she says, noting that ChatGPT and other AI models require large amounts of computing power and electricity.

Others, she adds, worry about how much data users end up giving AI companies, especially when students use free versions of the tools.

“We're not having that conversation,” she says. “We're not having conversations about what does it mean to actively resist the use of generative AI?”

Even so, the instructor is seeing positive impacts for students, such as when they use a tool to help make flashcards to study.

And she heard about a student with ADHD who had always found reading a large text “overwhelming,” but was using ChatGPT “to get over the hurdle of that initial engagement with the reading and then they were checking their understanding with the use of ChatGPT.”

And Stachowiak says she has heard of other AI tools that students with intellectual disabilities are using, such as one that helps users break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable sub-tasks.

“This is not cheating,” she stresses. “It’s breaking things down and estimating how long something is going to take. That is not something that comes naturally for a lot of people.”

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Het bericht Waarom horen we zo weinig van de James Webb-ruimtetelescoop? verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.

How often do you come in contact with a conspiracy theory?

Maybe on occasion, when you flip through TV channels and land on an episode of “Ancient Aliens.” Or perhaps when a friend from high school shares a questionable meme on Facebook.

How confident are you in your ability to tell fact from fiction?

If you’re a teen, you could be exposed to conspiracy theories and a host of other pieces of misinformation as frequently as every day while scrolling through your social media feeds.

That’s according to a new study by the News Literacy Project, which also found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. This comes at a time when media literacy education isn’t available to most students, the report finds, and their ability to distinguish between objective and biased information sources is weak. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 teens ages 13 to 18.

“News literacy is fundamental to preparing students to become active, critically thinking members of our civic life — which should be one of the primary goals of a public education,” Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager and author of the report, said in an email interview. “If we don’t teach young people the skills they need to evaluate information, they will be left at a civic and personal disadvantage their entire lives. News literacy instruction is as important as core subjects like reading and math.”

Telling Fact from Fiction

About 80 percent of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20 percent seeing conspiracy content every day.

“They include narratives such as the Earth being flat, the 2020 election being rigged or stolen, and COVID-19 vaccines being dangerous,” the News Literacy Project’s report found.

While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81 percent who see such content online said they believe one or more.

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Bowman noted, “As dangerous or harmful as they can be, these narratives are designed to be engaging and satisfy deep psychological needs, such as the need for community and understanding. Being a conspiracy theorist or believing in a conspiracy theory can become a part of someone’s identity. It’s not necessarily a label an individual is going to shy away from sharing with others.”

At the same time, the report found that the bar for offering media literacy is low. Just six states have guidelines for how to teach media literacy, and only three make it a requirement in public schools.

Less than 40 percent of teens surveyed reported having any media literacy instruction during the 2023-24 school year, according to the analysis.

Credible Sources

As part of gathering data for the report, teens were asked to try their hand at distinguishing between different types of information they might encounter online. They were also challenged to identify real or fake photos and judge whether an information source is credible.

The study asked participants to identify a series of articles as advertisements, opinion or news pieces.

More than half of teens failed to identify branded content — a newsy-looking piece on plant-based meat in the Washington Post news app — as an advertisement. About the same amount didn’t realize that an article with “commentary” in the headline was about the author’s opinion.

They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40 percent of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality. Only 8 percent of teens correctly categorized the information in all three examples.

In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56 percent of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.

Brand recognition could have played a role in teens’ decision to choose Coca-Cola over Reuters, Bowman says, a feeling that a more-recognizable company was more credible.

“Whatever the reason, I do think news organizations engaging young people on social media and building up trust and recognition there could have the potential to move the needle on a question like this in the future,” Bowman said.

Checking the Facts

Where teens did feel confident spotting hoaxes was with visuals.

Two-thirds of study participants said they could do a reverse Google image search to find the original source of an image. About 70 percent of teens could correctly distinguish between an AI-generated image and a real photograph.

To test teens’ ability to spot misinformation, they were asked whether a social media photo of a melting traffic light was “strong evidence that hot temperatures in Texas melted traffic lights in July 2023.”

Most teens answered correctly, but about one-third still believed the photo alone was strong evidence that the claim about melting traffic lights was true.

Bowman said that the fact that there was no difference in students’ performance when results were analyzed by their age leaves her wondering if teens “of all ages have received the message that they can’t always believe their eyes when it comes to the images they see online.”

“Their radars seem to be up when it comes to identifying manipulated, misrepresented, or completely fabricated images,” Bowman continued. “Especially with the recent advancements and availability of generative AI technologies, I wonder if it may be harder to convince them of the authenticity of a photo that is actually real and verified than to convince them that an image is false in some way.”

When it came to sharing on social media, teens expressed a strong desire to make sure their posts contained correct information. So how are they fact-checking themselves, given a minority of teens actively follow news or have taken media literacy classes?

Among teens who said they verify news before sharing, Bowman said they’re engaged in lateral reading, which she described as “a quick internet search to investigate the post’s source” and a method employed by professional fact-checkers.

Given a random group of teens, Bowman posited they would most likely use much less effective ways of judging a source’s credibility, based on factors like a website’s design or URL.

“In other words, previous research shows that young people tend to rely on outdated techniques or surface-level criteria to determine a source’s credibility,” Bowman explained. “If schools across the country implemented high-quality news literacy instruction, I am confident we can debunk old notions of how to determine credibility that are no longer effective in today’s information landscape and, instead, teach young people research-backed verification techniques that we know work.”

Actively Staying Informed

While conspiracy theories surface commonly for teens, they’re not necessarily arming themselves with information to stave them off.

Teens are split on whether they trust the news. Just over half of teens said that journalists do more to protect society than to harm it. Nearly 70 percent said news organizations are biased, and 80 percent believe news organizations are either more biased or about the same as other online content creators.

A minority of teens — just 15 percent — actively seek out news to stay informed.

The study also asked teens to list news sources they trusted to provide accurate and fair information.

CNN and Fox News received the most endorsements, with 178 and 133 mentions respectively. TMZ, NPR and the Associated Press were equally matched with 12 mentions each.

Local TV news was the most trusted news medium, followed by TikTok.

Teens agree on at least one thing: A whopping 94 percent said schools should be required to offer some degree of media literacy.

“Young people know better than anyone how much they are expected to learn before graduation so, for so many teens to say they would welcome yet another requirement to their already overfull plate, is a huge deal and a big endorsement for the importance of a media literacy education,” Bowman said.

Throughout the study, students who had any amount of media literacy education did better on the study’s test questions than their peers. They were more likely to be active news seekers, trust news outlets and feel more confident in their ability to fact-check what they see online.

And, in a strange twist, students who get media literacy in school report seeing more conspiracy theories on social media — perhaps precisely because they have sharper media literacy skills.

“Teens with at least some media literacy instruction, who keep up with news, and who have high

trust in news media are all more likely to report seeing conspiracy theory posts on social media at least once a week,” according to the report. “These differences could indicate that teens in these subgroups are more adept at spotting these kinds of posts or that their social media algorithms are more likely to serve them these kinds of posts, or both.”

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Now that the US presidential election has been called for Donald Trump, the sweeping tariffs regime that Trump promised on the campaign trail seems imminent. For the tech industry, already burdened by the impact of tariffs on their supply chains, it has likely become a matter of "when" not "if" companies will start spiking prices on popular tech.

During Trump's last administration, he sparked a trade war with China by imposing a wide range of tariffs on China imports, and President Joe Biden has upheld and expanded them during his term. These tariffs are taxes that Americans pay on restricted Chinese goods, imposed by both presidents as a tactic to punish China for unfair trade practices, including technology theft, by hobbling US business with China.

As the tariffs expanded, China has often retaliated, imposing tariffs on US goods and increasingly limiting US access to rare earth materials critical to manufacturing a wide range of popular products. And any such retaliation from China only seems to spark threats of more tariffs in the US—setting off a cycle that seems unlikely to end with Trump imposing a proposed 60 percent tax on all China imports. Experts told Ars that the tech industry expects to be stuck in the middle of the blow-by-blow trade war, taking punches left and right.

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The world’s first barcode, designed in 1948, took more than 25 years to make it out of the lab and onto a retail package. Since then, the barcode has done much more than make grocery checkouts faster—it has remade our understanding of how physical objects can be identified and tracked, creating a new pace and set of expectations for the speed and reliability of modern commerce.

Nearly eighty years later, a new iteration of that technology, which encodes data in two dimensions, is poised to take the stage. Today’s 2D barcode is not only out of the lab but “open to a world of possibility,” says Carrie Wilkie, senior vice president of standards and technology at GS1 US.

2D barcodes encode substantially more information than their 1D counterparts. This enables them to link physical objects to a wide array of digital resources. For consumers, 2D barcodes can provide a wealth of product information, from food allergens, expiration dates, and safety recalls to detailed medication use instructions, coupons, and product offers. For businesses, 2D barcodes can enhance operational efficiencies, create traceability at the lot or item level, and drive new forms of customer engagement.

An array of 2D barcode types supports the information needs of a variety of industries. The GS1 DataMatrix, for example, is used on medication or medical devices, encoding expiration dates, batch and lot numbers, and FDA National Drug Codes. The QR Code is familiar to consumers who have used one to open a website from their phone. Adding a GS1 Digital Link URI to a QR Code enables it to serve two purposes: as both a traditional barcode for supply chain operations, enabling tracking throughout the supply chain and price lookup at checkout, and also as a consumer-facing link to digital information, like expiry dates and serial numbers.

Regardless of type, however, all 2D barcodes require a business ecosystem backed by data. To capture new value from advanced barcodes, organizations must supply and manage clean, accurate, and interoperable data around their products and materials. For 2D barcodes to deliver on their potential, businesses will need to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers and commit to common data standards across the value chain.

Driving the demand for 2D barcodes

Shifting to 2D barcodes—and enabling the data ecosystems behind them—will require investment by business. Consumer engagement, compliance, and sustainability are among the many factors driving this transition.

Real-time consumer engagement: Today’s customers want to feel connected to the brands they interact with and purchase from. Information is a key element of that engagement and empowerment. “When I think about customer satisfaction,” says Leslie Hand, group vice president for IDC Retail Insights, “I’m thinking about how I can provide more information that allows them to make better decisions about their own lives and the things they buy.”

2D barcodes can help by connecting consumers to online content in real time. “If, by using a 2D barcode, you have the capability to connect to a consumer in a specific region, or a specific store, and you have the ability to provide information to that consumer about the specific product in their hand, that can be a really powerful consumer engagement tool,” says Dan Hardy, director of customer operations for HanesBrands, Inc. “2D barcodes can bring brand and product connectivity directly to an individual consumer, and create an interaction that supports your brand message at an individual consumer/product level.”

Download the full report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

With all the talk of the downsides of smartphones for teenagers, parents have looked to smartwatches as a way to stay in contact with their young children while avoiding the full internet and social media access of a phone.

At least that was the narrative a couple of years ago. But more recently, more companies have been marketing smartwatches to kids as young as 4 and 5 years old. And at younger ages, it’s not the kids asking for the devices, but parents looking to keep tabs on their children out of concern for their safety.

That’s what EdSurge senior reporter Emily Tate Sullivan found when she spent months researching the recent boom in smartwatches for kids, for a feature story that EdSurge co-published with WIRED magazine last week.

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“The worst case scenario in the minds of the parents I talked to is just always looming,” she says. “These parents think, ‘If there's a school shooting, if there's a lockdown, I want to be able to communicate with my child in that locked down classroom. If they are abducted, I want to be able to know exactly where they are. Maybe there's still a watch on their wrist and I can track them.’ I mean, these are things that are so improbable, but it doesn't really matter. The fear is pervasive. It's a really powerful force.”

But while parents focus on physical safety as they hand kids smartwatches, they may not be considering the downsides of starting a digital life so early, according to digital media experts. And schools are increasingly seeing the devices as a distraction — sometimes from parents texting their kids during the school day. Yet watches are often not included in school bans on smartphones, and they’re not always mentioned in the conversation about the effects of digital devices on children.

For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we go behind the story with an interview with Tate Sullivan, including details that she wasn’t able to fit into the final piece. And in the second half of the episode, the author reads the full article, so you can catch this story in podcast form.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or on the player below.

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In 2014, Ivan Crewkov moved his family from Siberia to the U.S. as his startup, Cubic.AI, was preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its smart speaker. A week before the campaign was supposed to go live, Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker, rendering Cubic.AI essentially dead in the water. “It was a disaster,” Crewkov […]

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An AI-based English learning app, ELSA leverages machine learning and advanced speech recognition technology to improve users’ English pronunciation and fluency. Their suite of products includes Speech Analyzer, which provides detailed feedback on overall speaking proficiency, and ELSA AI, offering personalized conversations with AI to enhance communication skills. The ELSA Speech API allows their technology to integrate with other platforms and applications.

Millions of users have improved their skills using the app, and now there’s ELSA AI—a tool to help people teach and practice natural conversational English using Generative (Voice) AI, available right at their fingertips through a mobile device.

The platform not only offers roleplay scenarios for learners to listen and reply, it is able to provide in-depth and accurate English fluency analysis and feedback to ensure progress. Using voice, not just text-based learning, ELSA AI helps learners master English language fluency, building their confidence.

For these reasons and more, ELSA Speak earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best AI Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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What difference did $190 billion make for student success coming out of the COVID-19 health crisis?

Not as much as you might think.

An ESSER spending analysis by Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University found some puzzling instances where funneling more money into a pandemic-worsened problem didn’t help schools recover.

The data ultimately points to no “silver bullet” in spending aimed at improving students’ academic performance since the pandemic, says Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab.

Return on Investment

A crunch of the numbers found that states varied widely when it came to the return on investment of their ESSER dollars. Both reading and math scores increased in districts in states like Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee, where the rate of ESSER spending per student was relatively high (over $1,000) from 2022 to 2023.

States like Nevada, California and South Dakota were also high spenders, but they saw some of the lowest gains in reading and math during the same time period.

Analysts said the difference likely came down to leadership in some states being “simply more effective at steering districts to focus on student learning” in the face of vague spending guidelines from the federal government. Leaders in Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee focused on setting clear goals and checking progress for reading and math performance.

Each chart shows the ESSER funds each district spent per student during the 2022-23 school year compared to the average years of learning gains or losses in reading and math. Source: Edunomics Lab.

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It is the weekend before my students arrive for the new school year. I am in my classroom listening to Lofi beats, pondering what has been and what is to come. All around my room are reminders of my identity as a 6’2, 280-pound Black and Puerto Rican man, husband, father, math teacher and basketball coach. I have come to find solace here; yes, these are part of my identity, which I hold dear to my heart — but as I have grown older, I have learned that few people ever see beyond them, including those who I call colleagues and peers in this education system.

In these moments, I frequently return to my favorite book, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. The novel’s exploration of invisibility, identity and the struggle for recognition resonates deeply with my experiences in education. Much like Ellison’s protagonist, I feel I have only been viewed as other people's definition of who I am supposed to be. When my students arrive, I feel I am expected to perform certain duties outside my job description simply because of my identity. My ability as a leader is hardly recognized. The struggles of being a husband and father are ignored. My existence as a person feels like an afterthought. These are the challenges I’ve faced. I want to feel seen for the many contributions I make in my classroom, school and community. This work is not easy, and feeling invisible at the same time is exhausting.

Ellison’s “Invisible Man” resonates deeply with my experiences and those of many teachers of color face in education. The novel’s themes of invisibility and identity crisis mirror the struggles I have faced in a system that frequently fails to properly acknowledge my presence and contributions. I hope that making my story of invisibility visible to those who may understand my struggle will help fellow educators of color feel seen, heard, valued, and, more importantly, retained in the classroom.

Who Am I in Education?

My career in teaching began in the fall of 2017, right after I completed the first summer semester of my graduate program. Soon after, I began my first summer professional development at a school in the neighborhood I grew up in. One of the first things I noticed was that all the students had to abide by a strict uniform policy, including shoes, belts and school colors, and middle school-aged children were walking in straight lines through silent hallways. I don’t remember middle school ever being like this, and the fact that it was mostly students of color gave me pause.

After my first three months as a teaching resident, the master teacher I shadowed went on maternity leave and never returned. Our principal also left a couple of months into the year, which prompted a takeover by central office leadership — all of whom were unfamiliar white faces in a school full of Black and Latino children. Before I knew it, I was teaching a seventh grade math class with little support on a tiny salary and barely any teaching experience.

Needless to say, I was not prepared for the unrealized stress. I quickly learned that teachers needed to play many different roles, wear numerous hats and complete far too many additional duties. I would be pulled from teaching almost routinely to address students with whom leadership in the building could not reach; that is when I earned the nickname child whisperer. Instead of a badge of honor, it felt like another invisible tax associated with being a Black teacher. It felt like my value was dependent on my ability to maintain order. From fist fights to classroom struggles, I felt limited and held within a box of preconceived notions about my role as the enforcer of system norms, the very things I despise about discipline-first school systems. It was as though I was a puppet and Geppetto at the same time. I felt like I was upholding a lie, having my students believe this is how things should be. I questioned my place inside the school, wondering what role I was really playing in students' lives.

I pressed on, hoping to still unlock our children's brilliance. Still, the beginning of my teaching career indicated that sometimes you need more than hope to make it in this profession as a person of color and education leader.

The Journey to Inspire Change

In the last five years of my career, the pandemic put a spotlight on the needs of our schools, teachers and students as conversations around what and how our children deserve to learn became divisive and critical race theory, and DEI became the debates of the time. Motivated to change this conversation and influence policy at the state and local levels, I ran for school board in 2021. It seemed like a great opportunity to try and create true change for our children while also creating an identity for myself in education that didn’t just center on how I enforce school policy for children who look like me.

Before I decided to run, I spoke with a few close advisors and the amount of immediate support was validating; however, I quickly learned that politics are not for the faint of heart. Narratives about my values and who I was were being established by everyone else. I was being accused of becoming Puerto Rican for the sake of the campaign, completely ignoring my upbringing and familial ties. The feeling I had when my wife was cropped out of an advertisement outside my campaign was infuriating. The lies about my allegiances and intentions were draining. It did not take very long for me to feel like I was just a name and face — and everyone created their idea of who I was behind it.

The campaign became draining for my family and tested the values that I chose to uphold and run on. Still, I hoped that being the only teacher on the ballot and having a commitment to my community through service would push me to victory, regardless. Unfortunately, it was not enough, and I would lose the race by a very slim margin.

A crushing defeat in many ways that made me feel like a failure. Watching others — white men, in particular — get the same opportunity after achieving less than me made me not only question my ability but also further reinforced the role the system wants me to uphold. At that moment, it all made sense. People see me how they want to see me. They prefer to keep me in a box. So, I choose to stay in the box that I’m most comfortable in —my classroom.

Making Peace with Reality

It is here in my classroom that I contemplate how to fight against a system that upholds injustice, a system that fights against the brilliance of diversity. This system does not allow everyone a seat at the table.

Nearly a decade in education, and I still wonder if I’ve truly existed. Does anyone see past my physical appearance? Do my titles of husband, father, teacher or coach even matter? Have I left an impact on anyone or anything? Am I invisible? I just maybe, and over the years, I’ve become ok with that feeling of invisibility.

Like the protagonist in Invisible Man, I may have been “looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.” It took me a long time and a painful adjustment of my expectations to realize that I am nobody but myself.

I do not need your eyes in order to be seen, and I do not need your validation to continue fighting for what I believe. I am everything and nothing of what you think I am, and I will move as I see fit.

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Do new AI tools like ChatGPT actually understand language the same way that humans do?

It turns out that even the inventors of these new large language models are debating that very question — and the answer will have huge implications for education and for all aspects of society if this technology can get to a point where it achieves what is known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.

A new book by one of those AI pioneers digs into the origins of ChatGPT and the intersection of research on how the brain works and building new large language models for AI. It’s called “ChatGPT and the Future of AI,” and the author is Terrence Sejnowski, a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-directs the Institute for Neural Computation and the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. He is also the Francis Crick Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

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Sejnowski started out as a physicist working on the origins of black holes, but early in his career he says he realized that it would be decades before new instruments could be built that could adequately measure the kinds of gravitational waves he was studying. So he switched to neuroscience, hoping to “pop the hood” on the human brain to better understand how it works.

“It seemed to me that the brain was just as mysterious as the cosmos,” he tells EdSurge. “And the advantage is you can do experiments in your own lab, and you don’t have to have a satellite.”

“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,”

— Terrence Sejnowski

For decades, Sejnowski has focused on applying findings from brain science to building computer models, working closely at times with the two researchers who just won the Nobel Prize this year for their work on AI, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.

These days, computing power and algorithms have advanced to the level where neuroscience and AI are helping to inform each other, and even challenge our traditional understanding of what thinking is all about, he says.

“What has really been revealed is that we don't understand what ‘understanding’ is,” says Sejnowski. “We use the word, and we think we understand what it means, but we don't know how the brain understands something. We can record from neurons, but that doesn't really tell you how it functions and what’s really going on when you’re thinking.”

He says that new chatbots have the potential to revolutionize learning if they can deliver on the promise of being personal tutors to students. One drawback of the current approach, he says, is that LLMs focus on only one aspect of how the human brain organizes information, whereas “there are a hundred brain parts that are left out that are important for survival, autonomy for being able to maintain activity and awareness.” And it’s possible that those other parts of what makes us human may need to be simulated as well for something like tutoring to be most effective, he suggests.

The researcher warns that there are likely to be negative unintended consequences to ChatGPT and other technologies, just as social media led to the rise of misinformation and other challenges. He says there will need to be regulation, but that “we won't really know what to regulate until it really is out there and it's being used and we see what the impact is, how it's used.”

But he predicts that soon most of us will no longer use keyboards to interact with computers, instead using voice commands to have dialogues with all kinds of devices in our lives. “You’ll be able to go into your car and talk to the car and say, ‘How are you feeling today?’ [and it might say,] ‘Well, we're running low on gas.’ Oh, OK, where's the nearest gas station? Here, let me take you there.”

Listen to our conversation with Sejnowski on this week’s EdSurge Podcast, where he describes research to more fully simulate human brains. He also talks about his previous project in education, a free online course he co-teaches called “Learning How to Learn,” which is one of the most popular courses ever made, with more than 4 million students signed up over the past 10 years.

© K illustrator Photo / Shutterstock

NextWave STEM is a leader in K-12 STEM education. Using the “five essentials” (leadership, self-development, team development, strategic thinking, civic-mindedness and innovation), the company’s vision is to empower students and educators to excel in a continuously changing world. Since its founding in 2017, NextWave STEM has partnered with more than 500 schools and community organizations nationally, served more than 200,000 students, and created award-winning STEM programs in emerging technologies. Schools and community organizations who have partnered with NextWave STEM report improved student attendance, increased student interest in STEM-related courses and careers, and increased teacher confidence in teaching STEM and emerging technologies.

NextWave STEM is a visionary leader that understands the needs of tomorrow and how to best equip and inspire the leaders of tomorrow with the tools and skills to be successful. By combining the project-based learning of STEM with innovative, emerging technologies, the company works to improve academic outcomes, close the achievement gap, and open new opportunities post high school and throughout one’s career.

The company makes STEM education engaging for students, easy for teachers and affordable for partners. Their solutions include award-winning curricula, hands-on exploration kits, and professional development. Courses cover: robotics and artificial intelligence, drones and coding, 3D printing and modeling, cybersecurity, entrepreneurship, and solar and renewable energy, and more. Courses are designed to help students develop the 21st Century skills needed to master problem solving and critical thinking, and be prepared for the influx of STEM-related careers, while professional development helps teachers master the facilitation of STEM education.

NextWaveSTEM® was born in Chicago as the brainchild of our founder, Udit Agarwal (pictured). While working as an IT analyst for Chicago Public Schools, Udit saw the need for excellent and easy-to-implement STEM education. He knew the importance of the education system and the economy at large to empower students with the 21st-century skills of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math as well as Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Innovation. Nonetheless, he didn’t see it being taught in a way that was fun for kids—while also meeting state and national standards.

As Udit learned more and became more interested in robotics, he started researching how to bring robotics classes to schools. He started putting the pieces together to start NextWaveSTEM. In 2017, Udit launched NextWaveSTEM® by offering after-school programming in Chicago. Today, at NextWaveSTEM, Udit’s company offers in-person and virtual courses for schools and turn-key curricula in Robotics, Drone Coding, Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing, and more at K-12 schools nationwide.

“For our students, we hope to spark a new way of learning using real-world applications and inquiry-based learning,” says Udit. “For our fellow educators, we offer authentic support from our own educators, curriculum developers, and executive team.”

For these reasons and more, Udit Agarwal of NextWaveSTEM earned an EdTech Leadership Award for his visionary work in our field as part of The EdTech Awards from EdTech Digest. Learn more.

The post NextWaveSTEM appeared first on EdTech Digest.

Het bericht Deze hypermoderne tank stelt je hele beeld van de legertank bij verscheen eerst op DutchCowboys.

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As Jennifer Hill’s eldest child was heading into fifth grade, she began to wonder how she would communicate with him in the hour between his school bus drop-off and her arrival home from work in downtown Cleveland.

This story also appeared in WIRED.

“There’s no phone in this house if something goes wrong,” she remembers thinking. “It’s not safe.”

When Hill was a kid, there were no cellphones, sure, but there were landlines. And friendly neighbors keeping an eye out. And close-knit communities where everyone knew each other.

“It’s not the way it is anymore,” she says. “I can’t imagine my kid walking up to somebody’s house, knocking on a door, and saying, ‘My friend fell off his bike. Can I use your phone?’ We teach kids not to do that anymore.”

She wasn’t ready to get her 10-year-old a smartphone, not by a long shot. Nor did she intend to install a home phone. She wanted her son to be able to ride his bike around the neighborhood in the afternoons, too—not just be cooped up in their house.

She quickly whittled her options down to just one: a smartwatch.

Hill knew of another family that had just purchased their child one of these high-tech wearables. Back then, in 2018, the kid-focused options were fairly limited, as were their capabilities. Hill got her son a Verizon Gizmo watch, which, at the time, had only rudimentary features, storing up to 10 parent-approved phone numbers and allowing the user to send only a handful of preset text messages (think: “Where are you?” and “Call me”). The smartwatch also had some simple location-tracking capabilities.

Fast-forward six years, and Hill’s two oldest children, now high schoolers, both have graduated to smartphones. Her youngest, a 10-year-old daughter, wears a Gizmo watch, only hers comes with all the technological advancements and upgrades accumulated over the prior years: photo and video capture, video calling, access to a full keyboard for texting, voice messaging, group chats, geofencing, and up to 20 parent-approved phone numbers.

Today, says George Koroneos, a spokesperson for Verizon, the smartwatch is “truly a phone replacement on their wrist.”

And the product category is booming. A decade ago, only a few tech companies made smartwatches for kids. Today, the market is bloated with players, new and veteran, vying for kids’ and parents’ loyalty—and advertising smartwatches to children as young as 5.

[Smartwatches] are becoming a child's first device.

— Kris Perry

“They are becoming increasingly popular,” says Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development. “They are becoming a child’s first device.”

Families are noticing, too—after all, they’re the ones driving this “explosion,” as Shelley Pasnik, former director of the Center for Children and Technology, describes it.

Hill has seen the evolution since her first watch purchase. When her sons were younger, she says, only a handful of their friends and classmates had smartwatches. Now, the devices are “huge” in her affluent suburban community of Westlake, Ohio.

“With my daughter, everyone’s got them. They’re as popular as Stanleys and Owalas,” she says, referring to the colorful, reusable water bottles that children have helped popularize. “All the little girls have watches.”

Kids clamoring for their first digital device are easily winning over adults who, let’s face it, aren’t putting up much of a fight in the first place, when always-on communication and precise location-tracking are part of the package that comes with modern parenting.

In fact, parent fears may be the real force propelling smartwatch proliferation.

The T-Mobile SyncUp is a kid-focused smartwatch that first launched in 2020. The company targets children ages 5 through 12 for the device. Photo courtesy of T-Mobile.

T-Mobile, which makes the SyncUp watch, conducted a consumer insights study and found that 92 percent of parents of children ages 4 through 12 felt it was important to “always know where their child was,” says Clint Patterson, senior vice president of product marketing at T-Mobile.

Today’s tools make such tracking possible.

“The way that parents monitor their kids has changed dramatically in just a generation or two,” says Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “Parents are monitoring their kids far more closely, really wanting to be aware of their location [and] concerned about their safety.”

This heightened surveillance has trade-offs. The trend has seeped into schools, where teachers and leaders have grown frustrated by the introduction of yet another digital distraction to students’ learning, even as more districts enact cellphone bans.

It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.

— Mitch Prinstein

Yet no one really knows where these gadgets fit into the larger conversation around children and screens. Research on kids and smartwatches is thin. Even data about adoption and use is lacking. This has left digital media and child development experts to extrapolate and hypothesize about the possible pitfalls and benefits.

“If this is a way of parents or kids achieving their goals and delaying their kids on social media, this might not be such a bad thing,” says Prinstein, who codirects the Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain, and Psychological Development and whose research focuses on adolescents and younger children.

“On the other hand,” Prinstein adds, “we don’t have a lot of research yet. It’s possible there are ways in which smartwatches are creating an electronic umbilical cord. That has possible risks as well.”

Technology ‘Training Wheels’

When the Apple Watch was released in 2015, it was seen—and priced—as a luxury good, notes Girard Kelly, the head of privacy at Common Sense Media.

It was also, back then, marketed to adults. But as new generations of the Apple Watch came out, some parents handed down older models to their children, says Pasnik of the Center for Children and Technology.

“Naturally, kids like to do things adults are doing,” says Jon Watkins, senior product manager for Bounce, a kid-focused smartwatch made by Garmin. “There’s a natural tendency for kids to want a watch like they see Mom and Dad wearing.”

Garmin makes a smartwatch for kids called Bounce. "Let kids be kids," an online promotion for the device says. "Save the smartphone, and let them explore the world with the Bounce kids smartwatch." Photo courtesy of Garmin.

Noting the trend—and in some cases, helping to grow it—other companies began to release kid-specific smartwatches with more limitations than an adult device. Apple, too, released a version, the Apple Watch SE, in 2020, with restricted features and a lower price.

Around that time, demand for kids’ smartwatches spiked, says Perry of Children and Screens. Educators, too, note a bump in adoption around the pandemic—one that has been sustained in the years since. The smartwatch market for kids is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion in 2024—and it’s growing rapidly, Perry adds.

A typical kids’ smartwatch today costs around $150 up front, plus an ongoing monthly subscription fee of $10 to $15. That’s certainly no pack of bubble gum, but it does put the device within reach for many families, particularly those who view the product as one that enhances their child’s safety, says Kelly of Common Sense.

Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense. It’s cheaper.

— Girard Kelly

“Parents are, like, halfway in between giving their child or teen a phone, and the watch makes sense,” he says. “It’s cheaper.”

To adults feeling pressure to introduce their kids to technology, a smartwatch may feel like a safer starting point than a cellphone that grants exposure to the entire internet, argues Kelly’s colleague Laura Ordoñez, executive editor and head of digital media family advice at Common Sense.

“What is the low-hanging fruit that doesn’t feel like it’s doing the most damage?” Ordoñez asks. “I believe that’s what’s motivating these parents.”

Numerous people cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” in interviews, noting the harm that smartphones and social media may be causing young people. Most smartwatches don’t have web browsers or social media applications. That in itself gives many parents an enormous sense of relief.

“Parents are increasingly aware of the problematic designs of smartphones and the troubling data on social media apps,” says Perry. “They want the connection, but they don’t want their child scrolling and online constantly.”

As the price of kids’ smartwatches has come down, though, it may have muddled how the wearable fits into a family’s overall technology goals. What started as a consolation prize offered to an older preteen or young teenager who craves technology, communication, and social inclusion has evolved into a sort of gateway device. Like bowling with bumpers.

“It’s a great way to ease into tech,” says Hill, the Ohio parent. “You can learn to take care of the technology in a small way before you are given it in a bigger way.”

That seems to be how the smartwatch makers view it, too. In interviews with executives at Verizon, Garmin, and T-Mobile, they describe their target users as ages 5 to 12, with the core customer base as parents of 8- to 10-year-olds.

“This is a very safe way to have a means of communication with a child,” claims Watkins of Garmin.

Patterson, at T-Mobile, describes kids’ smartwatches as “training wheels in the adoption of technology.”

“Just like you wouldn’t throw your kid on a bicycle, you don’t throw them at a smartphone or tablet with unfettered access,” Patterson adds.

What exactly are these training wheels preparing kids for? The bicycle metaphor suggests that someday, children will be allowed to zoom off on their own, liberated from their parents’ purview.

Yet untethering is not the trajectory families seem to have in mind when they buy their young kids entry-level digital tools. It’s not why Tim Huber, principal at Harris Creek Elementary School, part of North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System, is seeing more and more children in the early grades show up to school wearing smartwatches.

“It has been just a steady increase of kids, at younger grade levels, all the way down to kindergarten,” Huber notes.

To be sure, the reason that 5- and 6-year-olds—children who may not even be literate—have smartwatches is not to delay the purchase of their first smartphone or to ward off social media. For them, the watches are serving another purpose entirely.

‘Better Be Safe Than Sorry’

When Kristi Calderon’s daughter was in fifth grade, one of her classmates made a bomb threat.

“I rushed to them,” says Calderon, referring to her three school-age kids. “It was very scary.”

She saw only one of her children walk out of the building as the school was evacuated. In those next moments, she did not know where two of her children were or if they were OK.

“That’s what, like, killed me,” says Calderon, who lives in Long Beach, California.

The experience rattled her. Ever since, she says, she has ignored school policies around devices. She would rather know where her kids are and be able to communicate with them, to know that they are safe, than to be left to wonder and worry.

The youngest of her four children, now an 8-year-old in third grade, wears a smartwatch. He’s had one since he was in first grade.

Kristi Calderon with her family. The youngest of her four children, an 8-year-old, has worn a smartwatch since first grade. Photo courtesy of Calderon.

Experiences like Calderon’s—and the seemingly ever-present possibility of children encountering violence in schools—have driven parents to seek out location-tracking devices for their kids. Some settle for a simple AirTag fastened to a child’s backpack, but many also want the ability to communicate with their child, as Calderon does with her son during and outside of school hours.

Tina Laudando, a parent of two in Park Ridge, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, says she got her older son a smartwatch when he was 11 “so we could stay in touch with him and give him a little bit more freedom.”

Tina Laudando with her 12-year-old son. He was 11 when he got a smartwatch. Photo courtesy of Laudando.

His friends were getting together at the park, and she wanted him to be able to join them. And at his age, she didn’t want him to have to come with her every time she needed to make a trip to the grocery store. The watch, she figured, would allow him to stay home alone or meet his friends and communicate with his parents in case of an emergency.

Did she ever consider letting him join his friends at the park without a communication device? No, she says. That was never an option in her mind.

“The idea of him going to the park alone, going for a bike ride with his friends, without adult supervision, I think for me as an adult is scary,” Laudando says. “Being able to just, for myself, have that comfort level, knowing he’s OK, it gives me peace of mind.”

It’s a win-win, Laudando believes. Her son gets the feeling of more freedom and independence, and his parents feel confident giving that to him.

Laudando, like most of the parents interviewed for this story, grew up during a time when many kids would leave home on their bikes and be gone, unreachable, for hours, returning only for dinner. That was normal.

“It’s kind of sad, right? Because we lived without technology for so many years, and as I’m explaining this, I’m like, I don’t know what we would do without it,” Laudando says. “We’ve become reliant on it.”

But Laudando feels the world her children inhabit today is less safe than the one she was raised in.

Tina Laudando's older son, Nico, on his 12th birthday. He wears a smartwatch so his parents are comfortable letting him join his friends at the park and stay home alone. Photo courtesy of Laudando.

Tara Riggs, a parent of two in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, can relate. She sees videos on social media, hears stories from friends, reads the news. She feels “inundated” with negative information. It wears her down, she says.

“I’m constantly worrying,” Riggs admits.

Indeed, the internet—and social media in particular—can leave many with the sense that the physical world is more dangerous today than ever, when in fact, by a number of measures, it is notably safer. (What has gotten worse, in the past few decades, is child and adolescent psychological and emotional well-being. Some researchers and leaders, including the US surgeon general, attribute this shift to high use of technology and social media among youth. Others cite intensive parenting practices that, ironically, seem to undermine the normal development of resilience in kids.)

“The perception of danger versus the actual danger is a distinction that’s probably important here,” says Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association. “The perception of danger is heightened for a lot of parents.”

It’s a consequence of how much more connected our society is than it was a few decades ago, he adds. People can find out, in real time, about violent or disturbing events that happened many communities away. It leaves them with a sense that trouble—no matter how remote the possibility nor how many miles separate their families and the latest crisis making headlines—is looming.

Perhaps no tragedy feels more present and pernicious to a parent than a school shooting. One can take place on the other end of the United States, yet parents everywhere are reminded, viscerally, that their child, too, is at risk. It may have happened elsewhere, in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas, but the next one could be at their kid’s school.

“The psychology of fear—it’s extremely powerful,” says Huber, the elementary school principal. “We face that constantly. We are asking hundreds and hundreds of families every day to trust us with the safety and wellness of their child for seven to eight hours.”

Katie Joseph, assistant superintendent of Regional School Unit 1 in Bath, Maine, understands that school safety is a palpable concern for many families. Yet she urges those in her school community not to be overtaken by it.

I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.

— Katie Joseph

“I try to remind parents what I always tell myself: There is what is possible, and there is what is probable. Probably, all the things you’re worried about are not actually the things you should be worried about. You should be worried about the [device] in your child’s hand.”

Joseph believes the kind of “independence” a child attains by donning a smartwatch only runs skin deep.

If a child’s parent is constantly monitoring them, in touch with their every move, then really they are not developing a strong sense of responsibility, she says. Everyday situations that might allow for a child to experience and overcome challenges, to take risks and build resilience, become virtually frictionless when their parents are just one tap away.

“If my child is riding his bike and something happens, he needs to be able to figure out, ‘What am I supposed to do in this situation?’” says Joseph, who has an 8-year-old. “The first thing we should want our kids to do is not to call us and have us do the thinking for them.”

Because of the relative affordability of the smartwatch, and its limitations, many families may not be asking themselves how likely it is that their child would be caught up in a violent event, Prinstein notes. Rather, they may be thinking, “Will I feel regret if I spend that 200 bucks on Starbucks versus just getting the device, just in case?” he says.

“I think the calculus there is a little bit like, ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ even though logic might follow that it’s not truly necessary,” he adds.

Yet Hill, the parent in Ohio, believes that her decision, years ago, to buy her kid a smartwatch as a safety precaution has been vindicated.

One afternoon, riding his bicycle home from swim practice, her oldest son was hit by a car. He wasn’t run over, Hill says, but the driver sideswiped him and he landed hard, with his bike toppling over him. With a few taps of his watch, he was able to make a quick call to his parents. Hill’s husband drove the mile to reach him and took him to the hospital.

“If that hadn’t been there,” Hill says of the watch, “I don’t know that he would have had the wherewithal to give my number to somebody with him. He was scared. He was 13. He was by himself. As much as we drill it into him, that’s a lot to ask of a kid.”

The smartwatch, in that moment, was a “resounding success,” she adds.

‘Opening Pandora’s Box’

Late last summer, Riggs, the parent who lives near Detroit, began to research smartwatches. She was considering buying one for her then 10-year-old daughter.

Riggs and her husband had recently caught their daughter disobeying them. One afternoon, their daughter was supposed to be at a friend’s house around the corner from their own, a block away. But when Riggs’ husband passed that friend’s house on his way home from work, he noticed their daughter’s bike wasn’t in the yard. Riggs sprang into action. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood, going up and down each street until she found her daughter at another house.

“I didn’t like that feeling—that panicked feeling,” she says. “Where did they go? Did they cross the main road like they’re not supposed to? What are they getting up to?”

Her impulse was to prevent a similar situation by putting a tracker on her daughter. She spent months researching different smartwatch models, consulting other parents, scouring tech-focused parenting groups for insights. “I rabbit-holed that,” she says.

Then it occurred to her that maybe she was trying to solve the wrong problem. Riggs didn’t need a better strategy for monitoring her daughter. Rather, she needed to teach her child not to break the rules in the first place.

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“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)

The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.

“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.

True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.

Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.

“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.

Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.

They’re disruptive, distracting. It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.

— Katie Joseph

“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”

She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.

Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.

For leaders at RSU 1, whose school board voted to “eliminate” both smartphones and smartwatches in grades six to 12, it was an attempt to increase student connection—real-life, in-person connection—and by extension improve their mental health. They’ll enforce this by collecting all watches and phones at the start of the school day, placing them in lockable Yondr pouches, and distributing them at dismissal.

Huber, the elementary school principal in North Carolina, also recently wrote smartwatches into his school’s device policy, requiring that they be in airplane mode—functioning only as a watch, not as a connected device—during the school day. “The watch is considered a cellphone UNLESS airplane mode is activated,” the policy reads.

He would take the policy a step further if he felt he could. Airplane mode can be disabled with one touch, and truthfully he’d rather not see the devices in his elementary school at all.

“There has not been one time I have ever heard from anybody, ‘I’m so glad this kid had a smartwatch,’” he says. “I can’t think of any scenario where there is a need or benefit to having it.”

Still, he’s not sure how much additional harm they could be causing for a generation of children who “have already been raised on tablets,” glued to parents’ smartphones at the dinner table. What’s one more screen?

Perry invites parents and families to think about it another way. Once a child is given their own personal device, their digital life begins. The child’s data is collected. Algorithms are built around their preferences and practices. An online profile is developed.

That can seem relatively innocuous—it’s just a watch, right?—but what people may not realize is that smartwatches collect thousands of data points, “easily,” per day, per user, according to Kelly of Common Sense.

“The younger you’re connecting your child to that world, the more risk there is to them than if you didn’t,” Perry says. “That’s a tough calculation as a parent.”

Is it better to stay out of touch with a child, trusting that they’ll be safe enough as they move about the physical world? Or to invest in a tool that enables constant monitoring and communication, albeit through the shadows of the emerging digital world?

The big question today’s parents must wrestle with, Perry says, is, “Which risks can I tolerate?”

© Illustration: Jacqui VanLiew, Reference Images: Getty Images

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New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started.

The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack of qualified candidates and too few applicants. Special education, physical science and English as a second language were some of the most difficult areas to fill.

NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release that while the percentage of schools saying it was difficult to fill positions decreased — down 5 percentage points from 79 percent last year — “there’s still room for improvement.” Nearly 1,400 public K-12 schools from across the country responded to the survey.

While the comparison to previous years suggests that hiring is getting a bit easier, Megan Boren of the Southern Regional Education Board says the country is still mired in a teacher shortage.

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Boren, who leads the organization’s teacher workforce data and policy work, says it would be a mistake to think of teacher shortages only in terms of positions filled versus vacant. Other factors to consider include the geographic regions of schools, academic subjects and student age groups where shortages are prevalent.

The organization also takes into account teacher demographics, the number of candidates graduating from teacher prep programs, alternative certification programs and their level of preparedness.

“When we think of it as merely a body count, we are not looking at the whole entire problem and to be honest, we're doing a disservice to our students and our educators themselves,” Boren says. “Of the utmost importance is the quality and the preparedness with which we are filling some of these vacancies, or that we have leading our classrooms, and the distribution of that talent.”

Boren expressed concern over schools turning to uncertified teachers to fill the staffing gaps, be they candidates with emergency certifications or long-term substitute teachers. Their inexperience can put strain on the more experienced teachers and administrators who support them, she explains, at a time when both administrators and traditional teacher prep graduates say even new fully certified teachers feel less prepared than those in years past.

Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods or with a student body that is mostly — 75 percent or more — students of color filled a lower percentage of their vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to the NCES data.

“It's a firestorm where folks are going, ‘What can we do to put out the fire and then rebuild?’” Boren says, “and unfortunately, we're seeing in some cases that the measures and strategies being taken to put out the fire are actually making it worse, and causing an exacerbation of the issues for our educators and leaders.”

She says there’s no single factor that has led to teacher shortages, but rather interplaying issues that include pandemic-related mental health strain, the pressure of filling in for vacant staff positions, and a lack of time for collaboration and planning.

Teacher shortages didn’t start with the pandemic, Boren explains, as her organization tracked a teacher turnover rate that hovered between 7 percent and 9 percent prior to 2020. But she says the pandemic did accelerate turnover, with some regions of the South now experiencing 18 percent turnover among teachers.

“Certain regions of states started to stem the tide, but by and large the turnover is increasing,” Boren says.

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